The Ultimate Guide to SEO CopyWriting

Search engine optimization should be part of the long-term marketing strategy for any online business, regardless of the industry.

Why search engines? One of the most convincing arguments lies in the numbers: on Google alone, there are over 5.6 billion search queries… per day (which translates to a whopping 63,000 searches per second)! That’s an exorbitant amount of potential customers and a limitless source of website traffic.

To tap into the power and potential of this awesome traffic source, your website and its pages have to rank well on Google and other search engines. In this guide, we’re bringing you some of the most important tips for aligning your copywriting to search engine optimization (SEO):

Start with Keywords

Keywords are the building block of search engine optimized content. In other words, you have to do keyword research in advance, before you even start writing, in order to approach this marketing channel strategically and with a purpose.

You can use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, browser extensions for SEO marketing or Keywords Everywhere to find out which keywords you should focus on. You will see how competitive a particular keyword is, how many search queries does it get per month, as well as suggested keywords connected to the same theme.

You should aim to find the golden mean between volume and competitiveness: the ideal situation would be to identify a keyword that has a massive search volume, but low competition.

Place your Keywords in Your Domain Address

Ideally, your primary target keyword would be included in the root of your website’s domain. Just like we’ve mentioned before, if you’re competing for a very sought-after keyword like “shop” or “fashion”, you’ll have a hard time landing a .com domain with that phrase.

As for your keywords in blog posts, articles and images, remember to always include them in your article’s URL. You can do this by editing the so-called slug, which is the URL address that points to that article (for example, yourwebsite.com/this-slug-contains-keywords-article).

Scatter Your Keywords in the Title

The title to your copywriting pieces has two effects: firstly, it’s the first contact between the text and its audience which will determine whether they want to continue reading or not; secondly, it’s a powerful tool for ranking high on search engines.

If you use WordPress, you can use plugins like Yoast SEO to check whether your article title is SEO-friendly. Just make sure you don’t overdo it or place a keyword in the title in a non-organic way.

Write Unique, Valuable Content

The golden rule of copywriting is to provide a captivating piece of content that will increase your readers’ engagement. To achieve this, you have to put in a lot of time and effort into crafting top-notch texts for your website. If you’d like to outsource this work, you can use some of the following services:

When you’re done creating your ultra-awesome content or you received a deliverable from a writer you hired for your website, it’s time to check whether it conforms to all the rules of SEO-friendly writing.

You can use some of the following online tools and services to do this: Subject (to find expert reports on SEO and digital marketing), SmallSEOTools (to check for crucial bits of SEO-friendly features in your texts) or Readable (to check for readability of your posts).

Readability is another factor that boosts success both among the audience and search engines. Google and other search engines prefer content that has a high readability score, while for real humans, texts with high readability are more enjoyable and easier to consume.

Add Meta Descriptions

In SEO copywriting, we use meta descriptions to additionally attract potential readers and customers, but also to make your content more easily discoverable by search engines. Taking both of these things into consideration, meta descriptions should be focused on what search engines are looking for (keyword’s relevancy to the text etc.) with an effort to write them with the reader in mind.

In WordPress, it’s very easy and convenient to change the meta descriptions on your website, either through theme or element customization. If you’re using another content management platform, you can look for solutions to add meta descriptions to your content.

Work on Building High-Quality Backlinks

Here is where the mostly free part of the SEO copywriting story ends. If you want to maximize the potential of your website and increase its chances of landing among the first results on Google, you now have to work on placing your content on high-authority websites.

Relevant backlinks from your industry are one of the most important ingredients in the recipe. During their process of ranking results, search engines pay special attention to the authority of the domain, which directly translates to the number of backlinks that are pointing to it.

There are many ways to acquire backlinks. The fastest way is to pay for someone to include a link to your website on their own blog or site, but there are also ways to build backlinks for free. Here are some of the most efficient ways to get backlinks:

sponsored posts on similar websites

guest blogging

blog networks

commenting on other blogs and forums with your link included

link exchanges

Conclusion

Achieving success with search engine optimization can be a long journey, but the key is to align your content with all of these rules and stay consistent and patient. If you invest enough time and effort into SEO copywriting, you will have a solid, stable source of traffic that will attract new visitors to your website for years to come.